It Was This Or Twitter

This And Twitter

2010-02-24T15:18:00.003+02:00

Okay, so it's like this... This blog title was only going to last as long as I wasn't on Twitter. But now that I am on Twitter, having "IT WAS THIS OR TWITTER" emblazoned across the top of my blog looks a little... well... silly.

So I've moved.

Please head on over to http://thisandtwitter.blogspot.com, where you'll find all the usual unusual stuff.

See you there!

Color

2009-09-09T10:54:00.005+02:00

I just got my hot little hands on the first five seasons of the sketch comedy show In Living Color. Man, it's got some funny stuff.

Apart from regular favourites like Homey D. Clown, and any time James Carrey (Jim before he was Jim) or Damon Wayans appear on screen, there are a couple of really funny once-offs.

Like this "We Are The World" spoof. Pure genius.

Bad Command Or File Name

2009-09-09T09:07:00.005+02:00

A recent New York Times On Language column spoke about how the word "FAIL" has crept into the vernacular (or the parlance of our times, or whatever linguists call it). Somebody then wrote a letter claiming that its modern origins come from the old DOS command "Abort, Retry, Fail?", which I remember as being "Abort, Retry, Ignore?".

I was thinking that my memory was doing an Epic Fail, until I discovered "Ignore" was the old-old system. Which is, I guess, a Minor Scale Fail.

The Business End

2009-09-09T08:39:00.005+02:00

The funny folks at Football365 have a handy 2010 World Cup Qualifying guide up, which – with the next round of games already upon us – will have to be updated in a few hours' time. The Preliminary Competition (or whatever FIFA want to call it) is reaching a very interesting stage now, with Brazil and Ghana having joined the list of countries who'll be at next year's World Cup... and Portugal, Argentina and Nigeria looking pretty much doomed.

If you're following the action (and European Group 1 or the Concacaf League of Nations are two good places to start), I suggest you take a look at the Wikipedia page, where they list all the permutations and pernambulations (which is, I swear, a word I once heard used on SuperSport).... like, for example, "Denmark will qualify for the World Cup if they defeat Albania AND Hungary lose to Portugal AND Sweden do not defeat Malta."

Simple, really.

Block

2009-09-07T13:57:00.002+02:00

I love today's Non Sequitur. It reminds me of this old Calvin & Hobbes classic, which I think every writer has saved somewhere on their computer (if not pasted up on their fridge)...

Battle

2009-09-04T15:55:00.006+02:00

Time magazine have a photo gallery up of pictures from the recent fighting in Afghanistan's Kunar Province (hidden away in the gloomy parts of the Hindu Kush). The photos are high-contrast black and white, which makes them look like they fell out of a Sin City comic book.

Or from the pages of Battle Action Force.

Malign

2009-09-04T14:25:00.003+02:00

And now this one.

(By the way, the heading on the previous post is a pun on "Anything said in Latin sounds profound".)

(Har Har.)

Squidsquid Latine Dictum Sit Altum Videtur

2009-09-04T14:17:00.007+02:00

It's been a terrible week at work, and I was looking through my files (yes, I have files) for an old Non Sequitur comic strip to help sum it up.

I found this.

And I laughed at work for the first time this week.

Hold

2009-09-04T13:54:00.004+02:00

While other scientists waste their time searching for stupid stuff like... y'know... a cure of cancer, others are spending their time and research grants more wisely. Like the eggheads at the Israel Institute of Technology who've conducted research into what it's like being put on hold when you're on the telephone.

Turns out women like alt.rock, men like classical music, and nobody likes that annoying chick from Telkom to come on the line and say: "Your call is important to us. You are number" ... "Twenty-nine" ... "in line".

And they needed researchers to figure that out?

Beslan

2009-09-04T13:37:00.004+02:00

It's been five years now since the horrific Beslan school massacre. I was working in online news when it happened, and I remember sub-editing the Reuters news reports at the time, thinking: "This can't be happening."

The best account I've ever read on the events at Beslan is the feature published in Esquire magazine. Esquire rate it as one of their seven best stories ever, and it's hard to disagree. It's long (6 000 words, if I remember correctly) and it's harrowing. But it's some of the best writing, and best journalism, I've ever read.

Take a deep breath and go check it out.

New Moon

2009-09-04T12:17:00.004+02:00

The Big Picture has an amazing gallery up of photographs of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It's well worth a gander... if only to see a peaceful side of the Islamic world that Western news reporters often don't bother showing.

President

2009-09-04T12:07:00.004+02:00

I'm blowing the dust off a Cracked classic: The 5 Most Bad-Ass (American) Presidents of All Time. It's one of those stories where you kind of understand what Dan Carlin meant when he said, "History has ruined fiction for me."

Try this quote, from the entry on Andrew Jackson:

"The bullet, by the by, remained in Jackson's body for 19 years because, we assume, Jackson knew that time spent removing the bullets would just fall under the general category of "time not dueling," Jackson's least favorite category."

The rest of the revelations are no less insane: John Quincy Adams kept a pet alligator in the White House. And (again, to quote) checking Teddy Roosevelt's resumé is like reading a How-To guide on ass-kicking manliness.

Legends

2009-09-04T11:49:00.006+02:00

There's a fun feature up at Smithsonian.com, where they debunk a whole list of spooky legends about the creepy Smithsonian Castle. The big old Gothic/Romanesque red sandstone building certainly looks scary... and the legends are pretty cool.

Sample: The Smithsonian tried to find Noah’s Ark at Mount Ararat.
Another sample: There's a secret underground archive under the National Mall.
My favourite sample: The Smithsonian discovered Egyptian ruins in the Grand Canyon.

Sadly, none of the legends are true. And the whole point of the story is to prove that.

Psht.

Whatever happened to no letting the facts get in the way of a good story?

Atlas Shrugged

2009-09-02T16:00:00.004+02:00

Maybe, in my quest to shed some kilos, I should sign up for the old Charles Atlas deal. Smithsonian magazine had a brilliant feature on Charles Atlas last month. Here's a man who started out as a skinny, picked-on bully magnet, and ended up tearing telephone books in half.

Kind of like Spider-Man, just without the webs.

Ungraceful

2009-09-02T15:03:00.004+02:00

I was thinking about getting a scooter. Not any more.

Mountain

2009-09-02T14:44:00.004+02:00

"Fifteen minutes. I'll give you 15 minutes. And then you must go." While that's not the ideal start to an interview (although, come to think of it, it's about standard issue for South Africa's hapless sports journalists), in the case of Brad Wetzler's superb profile of Reinhold Messner for Outside magazine (published way back in 2002, but still there in the archives), it's the start of something great.

Messner is a grumpy, cantankerous old mountain goat, but you end up loving him despite all that. The feature is well worth the read (even if you don't care about mountain climbing), and the photos by Anton Corbijn are... Well, they're the reason I started reading the story in the first place.

20kg

2009-09-02T14:17:00.003+02:00

A week or two ago the medical aiders from Discovery Health came to our offices to offer voluntary health assessments. I'm happy to reveal that my cholesterol and blood glucose levels are both perfect, as is my eyesight. I'm not quite as happy to reveal that Discovery recommended I lose 20kg.

I weigh a round (OK, not that round: I like to think that my body is more a broad V than an O) 100kg, which means Discovery want my to drop 20% of my body weight. I've since signed up for the Men's Health New Man Challenge.

Let's hope it works.

Minus

2009-09-01T10:13:00.004+02:00

After about two seasons, I kinda felt like Dawson's Creek would've been better without Dawson in it. Dan Walsh felt the same way about Garfield – so he started a comic strip called Garfield Minus Garfield.

He does it using the same technology that helped Hitler get rid of Goebbels, helped Mussolini get rid of his horse-handler, and helped Microsoft get rid of a black dude.

And the results are no less bizarre.

Beans

2009-08-31T15:10:00.003+02:00

That's it. I'm officially sick and tired of this stupid economy.

Yo Joe!

2009-08-31T09:59:00.008+02:00

I watched GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Saturday night, and it was as big and stupid as I thought it would be. Movie critics have been absolutely merciless with it. Rolling Stone's review said: "I don't know what to say about the acting, writing and directing in G.I. Joe because I couldn't find any", while Premiere claimed that "This movie’s sole purpose is to make teenage boys high-five each other".

All I'm going to say is, it was loads of fun to watch. And I'll start listening to "serious movie critics" only when their "serious movies" start featuring Scarlett and The Baroness.

It did, though, get me to thinking about the Battle: Action Force comics my brother used to read (and I used to steal). And that got me snooping around the Intrawebs, where I found...

a site called Blood For The Baron, which has scans of all the old comic strips (repeat: all of them), there for my time-wasting, childhood-reliving pleasure. I'm so excited about this discovery, I'm pretty much beside myself (I'm sitting here next to me).

I mean, seriously: how cool/retro/geeky/nerdy/sad/brilliant is this?

Keeper

2009-08-28T22:04:00.004+02:00

The incomparable Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger (and yes, I did just use the word incomparable) has a great piece up at Soccernet, where he talks about ill-informed soccer fans and their ill-informed opinions on who is and isn't the best goalkeeper in Germany right now.

You could replace "soccer" with "any given sport", "goalkeeper" with "any given position" and "Germany" with "any given country", and you'd have a perfectly good sports story for any given newspaper.

Annie

2009-08-28T21:43:00.006+02:00

As part of their enormous Fall Fashion section, New York magazine have a feature story up on Annie Leibovitz. If you don't know who she is, pick up a copy of Vanity Fair, or Vogue, or a vintage copy of Rolling Stone, or pretty much any magazine with a reputation for iconic, beautiful, big-budget photography. Chances are, Leibovitz shot the cover photograph.

Now you'd imagine that someone so talented and so high-profile would earn top dollar. And you'd be right. Unfortunately, while she earns top dollar, she also spends top dollar. And, according to the article, she's pretty much broke.

A couple of sources weigh in on where the money went. "She wanted her life to be like a magazine spread," says one. "Everything beautiful, nothing out of place. She wanted everything to be perfect."

"She's a massive perfectionist," adds another, "and absolutely doesn't care about the impact on her own bottom line."

It's entirely her own fault. But it's still sad. And it makes her another (deserving) formerly-flush casualty of the economic crash of the late-noughties.

Sign Bin

2009-08-28T16:33:00.005+02:00

So for some reason I was thinking this morning about the time the New Zealand Cavaliers came on tour to South Africa in 1986. It was, I believe, in one of the Test matches (which all ended in fistfights) that Springbok forward Uli Schmidt got sin-binned for some or other outrageous act of violence.

Instead of sitting on the sidelines in a plastic garden chair, seriously thinking about what he'd done, Schmidt spent his 10-minute penalty reaching into the crowd to sign autographs for eager fans.

You've got to love that.

Hard Rock

2009-08-28T12:15:00.004+02:00

OK, so I don't usually take conspiracy theories all that seriously (although I maintain that Oswald did not act alone)... but here's a point in favour of the Fake Moon Landings crowd.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just determined that the moon rock given to the Dutch Prime Minister by the Apollo XI astronauts in 1969 is a total, shameless fake. That's no moon rock, baby – it's a lump of old wood!

Natural

2009-08-28T09:15:00.005+02:00

I went snooping around the New York magazine slideshow archives, and found this cool little collection: Super Models Without Make-up Or Retouching, taken from a feature for Harper's Bazaar. Of course, in their natural state Mses. Crawford, Valetta, Harlow and company look like total dogs.

Or maybe not.

Soul ≠ Soldier

2009-08-28T08:54:00.005+02:00

Oh, happy day! I got my ticket to The Killers, live in my home town in... December.

That's three months I'm going to have to wait, which means three months of Killers on perpetual repeat.

Moments

2009-08-27T14:13:00.005+02:00

Back in the mid-90s, when it was still a semi-respectable gentleman's magazine (and not the soon-to-be-shut-down slapper mag that it is today), Loaded magazine used to have a regular short feature called "Drop Me Bacon Sandwich!". The idea a of list Earth-shattering events: things that come as such a shock (the cancellation of the Grand National, Jarvis Cocker upstaging Michael Jackson at the Brit Awards, etc) that anybody who witnessed them would drop their proverbial bacon sandwich in stupified amazement.

Here in Internetland we don't eat bacon sandwiches. Instead, we spew out TLAs like LOL and WTF. And while nobody's compiled a definitive list of WTF moments, the good people at UGO have compiled a superb list of The Top 50 WTF Moments In Comics.

The list is amazing, and it's well worth the hour you'll spend trawling through all 50 entries. I especially liked the shoutout to Y: The Last Man. I've just finished reading the list.

And I loved it.

Hence all the comic-book pictures in this post.

(s)he?

2009-08-27T08:26:00.005+02:00

Here's the final (yeah, right) word in the he/she Caster Semenya gender debate: Slate's latest Hang Up And Listen podcast reveals that

CASTER SEMENYA

is an anagram of

YES A SECRET MAN.

Rewind

2009-08-26T14:43:00.005+02:00

A recommendation from Slate's Culture Gabfest sent me to the Shorpy Photo Archive, where they have an archive of thousands of high-res photos from the 1850s to 1950s. There's some amazing stuff there, and it's easy to get lost in the time warp.

The photos offer an incredible insight into what life – arb, everyday life – was like back then. The clothes, the tech, the transport... some of it seems to come from another world, let alone another time.

I love the little details in some of the photos too. Like the bicycle resting against the wall in this posed football shot. Guess the players didn't drive their own cars to practice back then...

I wonder, though, what my random Facebook pics will look like a century from now. Although I suppose they'll be lost on a broken server somewhere.

Mouse

2009-08-26T14:16:00.004+02:00

Wired's Gadget Lab has a list up of Apple's Five Worst Products... and topping the list is the infamous hockey puck mouse. Eight years ago my old iMac had a mouse like that, and – as the story rightly claims – it was a complete nightmare to use. The wire was way too short, so I kept reaching across my desk whenever I wanted to move the mouse, and it was incredibly uncomfortable and unwieldy.

But it looked great.

Sins

2009-08-26T12:14:00.003+02:00

Great little feature up at Wired. A team at Kansas State University has taken per-capita statistics for each of the 50 US states, and used them to create infographics showing how "sinful" each state is according to the Seven Deadly Sins.

One day, when I have the time and when it's not so obvious that I'm copying somebody else, I'd like to do something like this for South Africa.

Rolling

2009-08-26T08:49:00.003+02:00

I had a flashback this morning to one of those moments where you fall hopelessly in love with a slice of art. (Yeah. It happens.)

It was the cloudy European summer of 1996, and I was standing on a windy, cobbled street in Leeuwarden in faraway Friesland (of all places!), waiting for... I can't remember what. And while I stood there, two stringy-haired Dutch students started playing – and then improving – a Stonesy/Dylanesque version of Like A Rolling Stone on acoustic guitars, while their sheet music blew down the street and into a canal.

It was, dare I say it, better than The Stones.

August

2009-08-25T16:22:00.003+02:00

The Northern Hemisphere magazines are packed with Fall (Autumn) fashion features... which feels a bit weird to me, seeing as I'm busy proofreading our Summer Style Guide. New York magazine has a slideshow sample of The Best And Worst of August Fashion Magazines... and there's some very good Best, and some very bad Worst.

Life

2009-08-25T15:18:00.003+02:00

It's been a while since I read Calvin & Hobbes. It's good to go back there.

Style

2009-08-25T11:51:00.003+02:00

StyleCrave have a great feature up on the Worst Men's Fashion Ideas That Took Off. Anybody for a mesh shirt?

Chinglish

2009-08-25T08:39:00.003+02:00

Tragic news from the BBC: "The authorities in the Chinese city of Shanghai are starting a campaign to try to spot and correct badly phrased English on signs in public places."

I'm outraged. I have long time made love for the strange phrasings of Engrish and its variant forms. Now the Chinese Secret Police want to shut me down.

Luckily for us all, one brave man is leading the backlash against the backlash against Chinglish.

Go check out his site.

Mighty?

2009-08-25T08:25:00.004+02:00

I'm reading/reviewing a great new book by business boffin Jim Collins. He found that some of the companies he praised in Good To Great had gone from Great to Gone, and that some of the companies he praised in Built To Last hadn't lasted at all. Hence his new book: How The Mighty Fall.

Collins charts five stages of collapse for doomed companies. I started reading the book last night, and I'm already on Stage Three (Denial Of Risk And Peril), having already identified signs of Stage One (Hubris Born Of Success) and Stage Two (Undisciplined Pursuit Of More) in some of the companies I've worked for. As you can imagine, it makes for uneasy reading.

So far, it looks like my current employers aren't entirely doomed.

I hope.

Cynic

2009-08-24T17:01:00.004+02:00

I wish I didn't find this so amusing.

(Sheesh. And they call it A Softer World?!?)

Five Days To Go

2009-08-24T16:58:00.002+02:00

That's Indexed, summing up your Monday.

All The Small Things

2009-08-24T16:09:00.005+02:00

I've been reading up on microscopy for a science article I'm writing, and I came across the amazing Eye of Science site.

Go to their Gallery page and be dazzled... or grossed out.

Tech Support

2009-08-24T14:37:00.003+02:00

The Dark Art of IT... as explained by xkcd.

9/10

2009-08-24T14:01:00.004+02:00

I've just watched a horrible, cammed copy of District 9, the Sarf Efrikan sci-fi movie everybody's talking about. I have four comments:

1. Cammed bootlegs are rubbish. I will be watching this movie on the big screen, and I fully intend to get my memory wiped, MIB-style, to erase my memory of the crusty picture quality and screen-obscuring silhouette of some Russian dude's head.

2. The movie is brilliant, and although – as Roger Ebert notes – the third act does become a bit run-of-the-mill, that's not a problem when you have such an impressive mill.

3. Some US reviewers are reading the movie as an allegory on Apartheid. That's fair enough (though a bit lazy). I read it more as an allegory on xenophobia... which made it pretty powerful stuff.

4. Afrikaans swearwords are very, very funny.

Cover

2009-08-21T12:05:00.008+02:00

ESPN.com have a great gallery up of FMX riders, sans all the protective gear. As ESPN puts it: "With all the padding, neck braces and various armor needed to ride FMX, it's easy to forget what your favorite riders look like. Here's a reminder."

The pictures are loads of fun, and you really get a sense of the guys' personalities.

I remember us having the same problem at SI with cricket players, who wear face-obscuring helmets when they bat. It's not easy putting a guy on your cover when TV viewers don't know exactly what the guy looks like. (One solution, which it seems SI tried after I left, is to put Hitler on the cover. Can't say I agree with that strategy...)

SA Cricket have the same problem, which they compound by Photoshopping their cover shots into sweet oblivion.

But Sports Illustrated in the US have the same problem – and they use a lot of action photos (i.e. not shot in a studio) on their covers, so it's a huge problem when it comes to NFL stars.

F1 Racing also have to find a workaround, with drivers always wearing helmets when they're in action. Part of a sports magazine's job, then, is to make athletes recognisable enough that they can be used on a cover and help to sell the magazine.

Or not.

Sail

2009-08-20T17:57:00.004+03:00

I'm planning my next epic holiday, and already I'm hoping the ferry I intent to catch from Italy to Greece goes sailing through the Corinth Canal.

I doubt it... but you never know. And I reckon 10 percent of the fun of going on holiday lies in the planning anyway.

Tough

2009-08-20T17:50:00.004+03:00

SA Sports Illustrated have a wonderfully written story up by some guy (coughmecough) whose byline mysteriously didn't make the final cut. (As long as they write my name on the cheque, I ain't complainin'...)

The story was fun to write – and it was inspired in no small part by a superb gallery of photographs The Big Picture ran a few months ago on the Tough Guy Challenge.

Threepeat

2009-08-20T17:22:00.004+03:00

And that makes it three Non Sequitur days in a row.

Costs

2009-08-20T17:19:00.003+03:00

A classic Dilbert from the dusty archives.

Terror

2009-08-19T17:40:00.003+03:00

Speaking of Cracked (it's in the next/previous post), they have a giggle-uncontrollably-in-front-of-your-computer story up right now, called The 5 Most Embarrassing Failures in the History of Terrorism. It's one of those where you read the first three, then think that the last two aren't going to be as funny, then proceed to read those last two and laugh your head off.

Green

2009-08-19T17:22:00.005+03:00

Cracked.com have a very, very feature up, where they've devised a flowchart plotting the creation of a Green Day album. Now I like Green Day. I like their songs, and their effortless shifts from emo to screamo to punk. But I'll never listen to them with the same ears after seeing that Cracked flowchart.

Of course, it would be wrong of me to upload it here instead of offering a link to the Cracked site. But, in keeping with the whole white-guy-who-wears-mascara-and-calls-it-guyliner vibe, I'm going to do that anyway.